[Here is a paper I just gave at the VIPER conference in Basel. I wanted to
directly address the new media institutions, and raise some questions a
bout the dreams and realities of so-called "governance." Amazing what
Foucault gets used for these days - BH]
*****
SIGNALS, STATISTICS & SOCIAL EXPERIMENTS:
The governance conflicts of new media
The term "governmentality," coined some 25 years ago by Michel Foucault,
describes what is essentially a feedback process: the endlessly
renegotiated balances of a "microphysics of power" in which each
individual contri butes a vital force to the production of the social
frameworks that condition his or her behavior. Under this view, power does
not just come down on a population from above, that is, from the state and
those whose interests it serves. Rather, it also arises from the activity
of those whose i nvention and conviction are required to shape the
prevailing usages and norms. Thus the substantial reality of citizenship,
for a governmentality theorist like Nikolas Rose, does not only consist of
participation in a formal "public sphere," where enfranchised individuals
debate over the dis positions and meanings of universal law. Instead,
"games of citizenship" are played out in the most diverse arenas: 20
"The citizen as consumer is to become an active agent in the regulation of
professional expertise. The citizen as prudent is to become an active a
gent in the provision of security. The citizen as employee is to become an
active agent in the regeneration of industry and as consumer is to be an
agent for innovation, quality and competitiveness.... This kind of
'government through freedom' multiplies the points at which the citizen
has t o play his or her part in the games that govern him. And, in doing
so, it also multiplies the points at which citizens are able to refuse,
contest , challenge those demands that are placed upon them."
The strength of Rose's book, Governing the Soul [London: Free Association
Books, 1999] is to have retraced in detail some of the procedures that
have been developed since WWI for conceiving a population's self-conduct i
n psychological terms, observing and measuring it in its variability,
inscribing it as statistics, and then calculating the effects of the
governm ent programs, advertising messages and market offers that are
designed to channel it in specific directions. On one hand, these are
procedures for producing the objective truth of behavior, and thereby
norming it. But the claim being made in the analysis of governmentality is
that a large de gree of hitherto unsuspected freedom lies in the
continually changing subjective production of that which can only be
guided, directed, cajoled an d seduced from the outside, i.e.
self-conduct. Here is the source of the Deleuzean dictum that "resistance
is primary," along with the correspondi ng theory of social control by
"apparatuses of capture" - two ideas that have inspired much recent social
theory. But instead of just celebrating the breakthrough that such ideas
represent, one could ask about the specific kinds of games that we have
begun to play today, in the age of the so -called new media. For our
embrace, as a population, of miniaturized, networked electronic devices,
has made us into avid producers of signals, em anating from all aspects of
our psychic, sexual, professional, political and affective lives. These
signals of belief and desire are eminently sus ceptible to interception,
storage in databases, and transformation into statistics, which can be
used as guidelines for the informed manipulation of our environment, and
thus of our behavior. It then becomes important to know what kinds of
social experiments we might be part of. And I will g o further: it becomes
important to produce counter-experiments, to up the stakes of the game, to
deploy the primacy of resistance in the key arena s of our epoch. This
could be a worthwhile use for the relative autonomy of the new media
centers, festivals, exhibitions and educational programs . That is, it
could be, if participants can find the inventions, the critical
disco-urses and the political will to assert their autonomy in the f ace
of their funders - i.e. the state and the electronics industries.
Consider the case of Jakob Boeskov and his pseudo-company "Empire North,"
which signed up in 2002 as the sole Danish exhibitor at "China Police 20
02" - the first international weapons fair in the People's Republic.
Empire North's security product took the form of a prototype, advertised
on a poster under the name ID Sniper. The poster, displayed at the empty
stall that a trembling and uncertain Boeskov occupied at China Police
2002, c ontained this explanation:
"The idea is to implant a GPS microchip in the body of a human being,
using a high-powered sniper rifle as the long distance injector.... At the
s ame time, a digital camcorder with a zoom lens fitted within the scope
will take a high-resolution picture of the target. This picture will be
sto red on a memory card for later image-analysis. GPS microchip
technology is already being used for tracking millions of pets in various
countries, and the logical solution is to use it on humans as well, when
the situation demands it.... "As the urban battlefield grows more complex
and intense, new ways of managing and controlling crowds are needed. The
attention of the media chang es the rules of the game. Sometimes it is
difficult to engage the enemy in the streets without causing damage to the
all-important image of the st ate. Instead, Empire North suggests marking
and identifying a suspicious subject from a safe distance, enabling the
national law enforcement agenc y to keep track on the target through a
satellite in the weeks to come."
[http://events.thing.net/Boeskov_text.html] [http://backfire.dk/EMPIRENOR
TH/newsite]
Jakob Boeskov is an artist, a young but obviously politicized one,
satirizing the excesses of his state and corporate nemeses through a
radical fo rm of what Slavoj Zizek once called "over-identification." He
took an undeniable risk to realize his project, and by his own account
became almost unbearably afraid when, for instance, a French diplomat saw
the impossibility of the weapon, given the damage it would inevitably
cause to the in ternal organs of protesting citizens. Nonetheless, the
heart of his proposal - the miniature radio frequency ID tag to be
injected in the bodies o f the demonstrators - is quite real. It is
produced by a company called "Applied Digital Solutions." It is sold under
the trade name "VeriChip" [w ww.4verichip.com]. It is offered in several
different packages: "VeriTrack" for continuous surveillance of mobile
materiel and personnel; and "Ver iGuard," an implanted, infra-cutaneous
access badge which "cannot be forgotten, lost or stolen." Verification
guaranteed. This bit of silicon and wire is a technology for producing
effective truth. And as of October 13, 2004, it has been cleared by the
American Food and Drug Administration f or health-care use in the United
States.
The chips are supposed to provide "easy access to individual medical
records." But that apparently benign application could smooth the way for
oth ers, as is so often the case with surveillance technologies: "Applied
Digital Solutions of Delray Beach, Fla., said that its devices, which it
cal ls VeriChips, could save lives and limit injuries from errors in
medical treatment. It hopes such medical uses will accelerate acceptance
of under -the-skin ID chips as security and access-control devices." Of
course, Old Europeans will rest assured that only the U.S. could condone
such a bar baric idea, developed for control and security. On the
Continent it is pure pleasure that provides the necessary legitimacy: "In
March, the Baja B each Club in Barcelona, Spain, began offering VeriChips
to regular patrons who want to dispense with traditional identification
and credit cards. About 50 'VIPs' have received the chip so far,
according to a company spokesman, which allows them to link their
identities to a payment system." One man's unlimited whisky is as good as
another man's medecine it seems - and both are sufficient excuses to get
surveillance chips under our col lective skin.
The disturbing thing is how easily such invasive technologies are accepted
and made into norms. Under these conditions, the work of an artist like
Boeskov becomes a rare chance to actually play the governance game, by by
opening up a public space for refusing, contesting and challenging thes e
new tracking and recording regimes. To make such challenges effective on a
broader scale, however, at least three requirements would have to be
fulfilled. First, high-risk projects like The ID Sniper would have to be
accepted as valid and ongoing experiments within the new-media institutio
ns. Second, controversies around them would have to be produced, at the
largest possible scale, and not only in the realms of discourse. And
third, the artists involved would have to be defended, when their
investigations of corporate and state experiments succeed in generating
the all-too p redictable repression.
"YES, BUT IS IT ART?"
The obvious critique of governance theory is that ordinary citizens have
no imaginable possibility to accumulate the vast amounts of data that sta
te and corporate actors hold on them. Their desires and usages can provide
the vital thrust of an initial transformation; but subsequent expressio ns
will unfold within the established frameworks, to the point where
"expression" itself comes to feel programmed, solicited and channeled by
the manipulated environment. And of course, the procedures for stacking
the deck of governmentality are nothing new. Nikolas Rose shows how the
normal izing gaze of the psychological researcher comes to fall on
earliest infancy, scrutinizing the gestures of the gurgling baby and
recording them on film in order to produce abstracted and codified models
of behavior (plates 1-3, pp. 146-49). The cool efficiency of this gaze is
one of the sour ces of intense alienation experienced by industrialized
populations in the 1950s and 1960s, always unsure of which technocratic
mirror may have be en installed at the heart of their subjectivity. A 1974
installation by the artist Dan Graham, under the title Present Continuous
Past(s), provide s a public experience of this disturbing tension between
fluid self-presence and the return of the technocratic gaze. We see our
image in an ordin ary mirror, where it is as mobile as life itself; but at
the same time, and in the same mirror, we see a video device continually
projecting a sur veillance-camera recording from 8 seconds before,
haunting our present experience and informing it with its own capture. The
question of how one w ill play out this game between the spontaneity of
the present and the recorded traces of the past is at the center of this
paradigmatic artwork, which is nothing other than a meta-model of
innumerable social experiments.
It would be interesting to reconsider the production of the postwar
installationists, to see to what extent the feedback loops of
governmentality became an issue in their devices. Another artist one would
soon encounter is Bruce Nauman, whose long-term obsession with behaviorism
becomes explicit in a late installation like Rats and Bats (On Learned
Helplessness i n Rats), from 1988. The piece takes the form of a yellow
plastic labyrinth, using video monitors in the place of the traditional
bait that lures l aboratory rats through the maze and a soundtrack of
painfully loud rock'n'roll drumming in the place of the traditional
electroshock. The commerci al media are staged as the determining stimuli
of a social experiment. But the pathos of Nauman's art betrays all the
melancholy of the objective and objectifying model; and it culminates in
his anguished emphasis on "withdrawal," which is precisely the syndrome
that postwar industrial psych ologists sought to cure in the alienated
worker. More interesting would be to look at all the phases that lead from
the resurgence in the 1950s of concrete poetry - with its corporeal and
respiratory foundation for direct human expression - through cut-up and
montage procedures conceived aga inst televisual continuity, to the
dynamic interactions of the 1960s happenings and the political psychodrama
of Oyvind Fahlstr 96m's game-pieces, and then on to the early media work
of an artist like Nam June Paik. These are just a few of the ways that
artists engage in an active resistance to formatted behavior, and in a
channeling of alternatives -- literally, in Paik's case, with the famous
satellite-relay video piece of 1973, ent itled Global Groove.
The examples I'm quoting here are canonical, they are found in textbooks
and in prestigious white cubes. But they and many others could be used as
a genealogy, leading through a history of twentieth-century art in its
subtly or explicitly conflictual relation to what the sociologist Alain To
uraine once called "the programmed society." So the point is that
interventionism in the forms and devices of technological governance
really is a rt, and a quite important form of art (though not the only
one, of course). But what has to be recovered today is the symbolic and
practical antag onism that pits one kind of social experiment against
another. This is the kind of game that can unfold within the computerized
media, where the c ontemporary forms of data-gathering are practiced, and
where the new control regimes are being imposed, through the use of
truth-producing devices like the VeriChip. But an interesting conflict
rarely just happens - particularly since contemporary art itself has now
been normed, organized, c hanneled into the safe-havens of museums. The
debate must be created, extended, deepened and resolved in public, where
the issues themselves exist.
PRODUCING THE CONTROVERY
If interventionist projects have a much greater intensity today than the
purely symbolic constructions of older artistic models, it's for a simple
reason: the attraction of the reality show. What matters in The ID Snipe r
is the fact that Boeskop was there, and beyond that, the fact that you
might go there someday soon. What matters is that the effects of the inte
rnational arms economy are shockingly real. So there's no use to cry
populism and withdraw into hermetic abstraction. Much better is the
productio n of an intelligent event, bringing reality to a more complex
and challenging level of display. Activists have always known how to do
this. A grea t example is the projection onto the building of the World
Intellectual Property Foundation in Geneva, of the video by the San
Francisco group Neg ativeland, Gimme the Mermaid, which deliberately
infringes on the copyright of Disney
[www.geneva03.org/polimedia/display.php?id 3D27&lang 3Den]. The screening
on the WIPO building in the context of the World Summit on the Information
Society in December 2003 could hardly been more significa nt where the
intellectual property game is concerned. But the event itself was seen by
a relatively small number of people and understood by even fewer; it has
to be distributed. And this could be the real role of the institution in
the process of contemporary governance.
Take a rare example: the Public Netbase in Vienna [www.t0.or.at/t0]. Two
recent projects have been exemplary: Nikeground, by 0100101110101101.org,
and System 77 Civil Counter-Reconnaissance initiative, by Marko Peljhan.
Both events were held on the Karlsplatz, under conditions of semi-legali
ty that contributed to the meaning of the display. The first went up
against a powerful transnational corporation, to undercut the norm of
logo-ty ping that installs corporate worlds as the very earth beneath our
feet [www.nikeground.com]. It proposed renaming the historic city square,
instal ling a gigantic swoosh sculpture to redefine the very notion of
public art, and of course, providing a new style of shoe to put you into
intimate contact with the transfigured ground of your existence. The
second took on the issues of sophisticated surveillance techniques as the
exclusive pr erogative of the state [www.s-77ccr.org]. It proposed a
civilian appropriation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to restore the
balance between t he citizens and the police. In both cases it was
necessary to engage with local bureaucrats and politicians, so as to push
the artistic fiction in to the media and prolong the uncertainty
surrounding its kernel of truth. Only by sparring with private interests
and public authorities, while atthe same time distributing information and
disinformation through every attainable channel, could Public Netbase give
either of these two project s the presence they need - if we really want
them to even begin to interfere with the ordinary games of governance. But
is the media-art community capable of supporting such radical initiatives?
DEFENDING THE TRICKSTERS
The answer, on the institutional level at least, is that things don't look
particularly good. Public Netbase has seen the constant trimming of its
operational budget, despite being the only Viennese cultural institution
to take a radical stance against the Haider governments. Now it looks li
ke this impressive new-media laboratory is going to definitively close its
doors, having recently laid off its entire staff and ceased its operati
ons. Meanwhile, as everyone knows, a more iniquitous and dangerous
situation has emerged in the United States, where Steve Kurtz of Critical
Art E nsemble is on trial before a federal grand jury for a technicality
concerning the way that he obtained perfectly harmless sample of e. coli
bacter ia. That technicality of mail and wire fraud could carry a maximum
of twenty years in prison. What kind of social truth is going to be
produced by that grand jury? It's urgent everyone make a cash donation to
the CAE Defense Fund, which i-n November 2004 is down to zero and needs
fresh resou rces [www.caedefensefund.org]. At a certain point, money and
political support become the feedback loops that really make a difference.
These sorry situations are indicative of the immeasurably broader state of
world affairs, which is not going to turn around very quickly. It's all
very well to feel optimistic about governance theory, and to talk about
power rising from below - but the question of what exactly happens on the
way up can no longer be overlooked. Much more concerted efforts will have
to be made, at a higher level of critique and political demand, if we w
ant to keep a few experimental arenas open in the worlds of art, media and
activism, to go on exploring the possibility of governing ourselves oth
erwise.
Brian Holmes
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